external harddrive type/size question

[mailman3028]

Hey folks!
Looking for a little advice. I would like to place MAME32, WinKawaks, and Nebula on a portable drive along with the ROMs and CHDs. This way I can take my control panel to others houses and play on big screen tv. My questions are:

What size hard drive will fit it all, probably with Gameex as the frontend?

Should I get an AC powered drive or USB only. This one might require a bit more info for an informed answer. My CP requires 3 USB ports for the ipac, trackball, and spinner. I have a powered hub, so I am thinking a USB only external drive would be ok and not overload the USB capacity. Was thinking of one of those very small drives, like a Western Digital Passport 160 gig or so.

Any opinions/input would be appreciated!Thanks

[Xam]

Not real sure on all your questions.

I guess size would depend on what games you are planning on playing.

I just got a 320 gig Maxtor at circuit city for $99.00...it seems to work fine for so far. It is AC powered.

Xam

[torez]

He thinks of one of these small (2.5" laptop size) hard drives.
In my opinion get one as big as you can afford.  You basically pay some fixed price for the hardware.  From that point on extra gigabytes are pretty cheap.  Look for sales on these external hard drives for extra savings/more GB.  If you are in US, check out local circular at staples.com and bestbuy.com for your zip code.  3.5" (desktop style) external drives are cheaper per GB and are faster, so you would have to decide how much portable vs. performance/size you want to go.

[SavannahLion]

According to a some manufacturers, the 2.5" laptop drives are designed to take a certain amount of beating whereas the 3.5" desktop drives are designed more for gentle applications.

My GF is busy testing the durability of her 2.5" drive iPod, so I'll let you know how it goes.

Meh, something to keep in mind I guess 

[Herk]

mailman3028

A full set of Mame roms and chds will take up about 60 gig.  I don't know about the others.  You must check the specs of the drive and your computer to make sure the read/write speeds are very good.  You also want to have a drive that is at least 5400RPM, A lot of 2.5" drives are 4200RPM and will be a bottleneck.  If you can afford it go with a 10000RPM.  Make sure your computer is USB2Hispeed.  USB1.1 is a definite bottleneck.  Buy an external enclosure that has a good quality daughterboard built in and has both Firewire and USB2Hispeed.  Firewire is faster than USB1.1 and USB2Hispeed on paper but real world results will vary.  I have found that Mame roms on an USB powered 4200 2.5 external drive will lag at times.  Operating systems do not give external drives as much priority as serial or ATA drives and will always be second in line for process priority.  All this is why I believe you should go with the fastest read/write, fastest RPM, external AC powered and Firewire for optimal results at this time given present technology for consumers.

Herk

[ahofle]

I don't think that drive RPM is really that important, for MAME at least.  Once a romset is loaded into memory the disk does nothing (with the exception of the CHD games which are mostly unplayable with current hardware anyway).  So you may get a small boost in load time, but the game won't run any faster once it's loaded.  I think you will be fine with a 160 gig USB laptop drive personally.  Just make sure you are using a really good hub.

[Herk]

ahofle,

If you are having a hard time running chds, try fastmame specifically for them.  It makes a lot of the chds quite playable.  Software has the most to do with chds running poorly these days.

Herk

[ahofle]

Thx, will definitely check it out!

[Sensei]

All (I think) 2.5" external USB hard drives require power in addition to the one USB connection to the computer.

They usually come in 2 flavors.
1)  External power supply via a brick
2)  An additional USB connection

So either you plug the drive into an outlet or you'll need 2 USB connections (and if from a HUB then it needs to be a powered hub)

And I agree with the previous posts that USB hard drives do bottleneck and they sometimes take a moment to spin up when they have not been accessed recently.  But hey....nothings perfect.

Just my $0.02 worth.